His youth explains a lot of the gawkiness of the language and the immaturity of his view of character and, indeed, of plot. Since he was born in 1920, Robbie was published when he was just 20! Runaround when he was 21, and so on.

Calvin appears as a central character in three of them, anyway, and the comedy pair of robot testers, Powell and Donovan appear in another three consecutive stories, so the stories already contained threads and continuities…Ī lot is explained once you learn that these were pretty much the first SF stories Asimov wrote. Paradoxically, they make a more effective continuous narrative without Asimov’s ham-fisted linking passages.

These interventions don’t precede and end every story if they did there’d be eighteen of them there are in fact only seven and I think the stories are better without them. Susan Calvin, a pioneer of positronic robots and now 75 years old, tells each story to a reporter whose been sent to do a feature on her life. The stories are (sort of) woven together by a framing narrative in which the fictional Dr. The nine stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 19, and were then compiled into a book for stand-alone publication by Gnome Press in 1950, in the same way that the Foundation trilogy also appeared as magazine short stories before being packaged up by Gnome. it is not a novel at all, but a collection of science fiction short stories.

I robot isaac asimov